Welcome to the AI Ecosystem Report, featuring practitioner analyst and entrepreneur Toni Witt. This series is intended to deliver the timely intelligence about artificial intelligence (AI) you need to get up to speed for an upcoming client engagement or board meeting.
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Highlights
Innovation (00:28)
In the finance and banking industries, small business lending is one area that applies GenAI. Based in Connecticut, Bankwell is testing how it can build GenAI into its operations by onboarding software built by startup Cascading AI. It’s essentially a copilot for small businesses looking to take out loans.
This software is used to prequalify and make loans to small businesses through a conversational interface that walks the small business owner through the loan application process. Throughout the process, a human loan officer is in the loop and there are people reviewing conversations to ensure the AI isn’t producing false responses. There’s also a full audit log of conversations.
Cascading AI recently raised $4 million in funding. Although it’s in the early stages, the startup seems to be on a promising track. Across the lifecycle of a bank customer, there are several ways that GenAI can make a difference.
Funding (03:19)
Conversational GenAI startup Rasa announced a $30 million series C round of funding to further expand its team. This startup helps enterprise customers launch GenAI-based customer service programs, automating or eliminating expensive parts of the customer service process. It also has a unique focus on enterprise-grade security with a dashboard that enables customers to observe performance.
Rasa’s offerings power two of the world’s top three banks, major insurers, global travel and hospitality firms, and other large brands. It focuses on financial services, healthcare, telecom, and travel/transport industries. Being primarily low-code, Rasa has been downloaded more than 50 million times by developers.
Solution (05:00)
OpenAI announced its text-to-video model, Sora. It turns prompts into detailed 60-second videos. Access to this product has only been opened to a small number of early-access creators but should be launched publicly soon.
There are a few notable applications of Sora. In the near term, it can be used for creating b-rolls for stock videos and video ads as well as for video editing. In the long term, it may be developed for content marketing, producing videos, and even entertainment purposes such as creating full feature-length films down the line. It can also bring images to life and extend videos in various directions.
This product could reduce the value of production quality in the future, as anyone will be able to produce high-quality videos with Sora. With text-to-video, there are greater concerns around security and privacy, as it presents greater challenges with hallucinations, deep fakes, misinformation, and harmful content. Copyright will need to be further addressed. Regulators will have to move very quickly on this.
While there are some errors here and there with the output, Sora produces high-quality results. This is the worst that text-to-video will ever be — and the pace of development will only continue to accelerate.
